


Guttersnipes

by negativecosine



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-24
Updated: 2010-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/pseuds/negativecosine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Really, there was only one thing we could do -- we agreed almost immediately, never had to talk about it. No matter what, never, ever pity or envy each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guttersnipes

**Author's Note:**

>   
> [Originally posted here](http://community.livejournal.com/rs_games/26207.html) for Team MWPP in [](http://community.livejournal.com/rs_games/profile)[**rs_games**](http://community.livejournal.com/rs_games/).

  
Could write novels about our lives, great, sweeping ones; the kind where every bookstore in Britain and half the Continent would be clamouring to have me in for signings. We'd be famous.

  
But, no, to hell with that. It's none of their bloody business anyway. It's just me and Moony, right, and we can be as great and sweeping as we please without the audience.

  
Really, there was only one thing we could do -- we agreed almost immediately, never had to talk about it. No matter what, never, ever pity or envy each other.

  
And I can't feel sorry for him, I can't. I know he's hurting, I know he's lonely and fucking terrified, all the time, but that's nothing to feel sorry for, because, me too. And he knows it. I match him blow for blow, every night lying awake or waking up shaking, every fight, every time. We take turns, 'cause we have to, if we fell apart at the same time we know Prongs and Wormtail wouldn't know how to deal, so he has dibs on the week around full moon, and I have dibs on new moon week, and the weeks in between we work out as we go.

  
Actually, it's kind of satisfying. We're _epic_, you know? Prongs says melodramatic, but he's one to bloody talk, way he carries on, but no, we're like Shakespeare, we're important, we matter 'cause we hurt so well. It's not something I'll ever say aloud -- first, it sounds really bloody stupid, and second, I don't ever _need_ to say it. Everyone who matters already knows.

  
Like I say, we figured this out _really_ early. Before we figured out the werewolf thing, before we figured out anything. First day of first year, he was sleeping on the train when we all found him. Big dark circles under his eyes, and even back then he seemed so small. Kinda wanted to fold him up and keep him in my pocket for later, like chocolate or rocks, or small, sharp things I find on sidewalks. He didn't snore or anything, and he couldn't tattle if he was sleeping, and all the other compartments were full.

  
We didn't poke him awake 'til the lady came with the cart, and then through Prongs' attempt to buy out the witch's entire stock and our usual ruckus, we managed to squeeze a name out of him. The minute we first heard him speak, Prongs ordered the witch (how he got off _ordering_ people like that, and him without the Noble and Most Ancient to back him up, even) to find tea because he was so hoarse, it sounded like he'd tried to swallow nails. Remus being himself, he refused to even touch all the sweets Prongs got 'til Pete showed up and started eating everything in sight, and then I guess it was all right.

  
But I didn't feel bad for him, not even a little bit, 'cause I could still feel the spot where my latest hex-marks were rubbing against the inside of my shirt from the last time Mother was out of town and Father got out the Firewhisky, and it's pretty damn hard to feel sorry for some tiny, shabby nerd you've only just met when you've got boils all down your back.

  
He paid me back for that when I came back from Christmas holidays that year. I had a black eye -- puns were made, mostly by Slytherins -- from Father, and Mother, when I'd showed it to her, set a spell so it couldn't be spelled away. Madame Pomfrey kept me there a whole day, trying different things, then gave up and called McGonagall to 'Inform' her.

  
I couldn't figure out at the time why they kept talking in capital letters with hushed voices, turned away from me, but they finally figured they couldn't really prove anything, not enough to get the Ministry involved at least, so they sent me back to the dorm with instructions: Do Not Get Yourself Into Trouble, Mr. Black. (I formed that reputation early, see.) And when I came back it was just Remus there (James and Peter were in detention for an Incident in Potions, or maybe they were off causing another Incident -- can't remember), and he was all pale and tiny and reading, but he sat up when I came in and he looked at me, right straight in my lopsided, purpled face, and said to me solemnly, "Doorknob?"

  
"Yes," I told him. A vicious doorknob; the sort that lurked in dark corners and leapt out at you. And solemn, ceremonially (Remus did everything ceremonially, with pomp and seriousness that made most of it just that much more absurd), he said that he knew the insidious sorts of doorknobs of which I spoke, and that we should, clearly, band together to form a defensive front against this terrible evil. We spent the rest of the evening out prowling the castle, hexing doorknobs with whatever little spells we could manage after only a few months of lessons. We finally got chased back to Gryffindor Tower by Peeves when Remus said a spell I'd never heard of, and it made a wad of gum that we'd stuck in the keyhole of one of Filch's storage cupboards shoot right up Peeves' nose.

  
Then it was Remus' turn again a couple of months later. When we found out, I told him very flatly that we knew and asked why he hadn't mentioned it.

  
(And for the record, if anyone's keeping a record, _I_ found out first, and told Prongs who told Wormtail who nearly fainted -- and it is imperative that I get credit for that particular bit of cleverness. It was not at all because I had snuck into the Hospital Wing to snitch some supplies and had seen Pomfrey healing him, and I was not at all sorry for him even though it looked like he'd been nearly gutted; I wasn't sorry for him, no, but I did have to run off and vomit in the third floor girl's loo, because there was more blood than even I had seen.)

  
Prongs was so excited; he'd never known anyone so interesting, so dangerous (except me, but I wasn't legally classified as a dark creature, so that wasn't the same), and started asking way too many questions -- weird questions, probing, grabbing, questions like: What happens on lunar eclipses? What about if a werewolf went to the moon on a Muggle space ship?

  
Peter just kind of stared. Pete stared at Moony for nearly a month, and then he saw him after the full moon next, saw the blood and the exhaustion and just...stopped. James stopped asking questions, too, and then it was all fine, and I was the only one who didn't have to do anything, 'cause it just made too much sense.

  
When I made the Quidditch team, he wasn't a bit jealous because who wanted that much risk, that much attention? When he made Prefect, I wasn't a bit jealous because who wanted that much work, that much responsibility? When me and Prongs and Wormtail managed that huge bit of magic, he wasn't jealous of our skill because it was our gift to him. When he had that big breakthrough on the Map, the one that let us track people who weren't there, I wasn't jealous of his cleverness because it meant that I got to build on it.

  
I wasn't jealous of his loving parents; he wasn't jealous of my money. I wasn't jealous of the way girls seemed to cozy up to him, doing nice things for him and nodding when he talked; he wasn't jealous of the way the same girls seemed to fall into my lap, even an hour or so later, their pleated skirts riding up or their shirts unbuttoned low. I didn't feel sorry for him when I shagged a few of those girls, and he didn't feel sorry for me when he dated those same girls. He got to kiss them, I got to snog them. Often enough, I'd be shagging them while they were still dating him, and he knew that, because I generally did so on his bed.

  
When I left the Noble and Most Ancient Pile of Owl Shit, I didn't go straight to Prongs' place. I spent that night in London, walking around at random, my shrunken trunk heavy in my pocket. I'd already sent an owl to each of the three of them, brief, giddy, maybe hysterical. Maybe I was laughing, mad, in the weird London night. Maybe the vagrants sleeping in the shop doorways looked at me funny. Maybe they looked at me, but not funny at all -- maybe they pitied me, or were jealous of me.

  
Remus' owl found me first.

  
_Where are you_, it said firmly. No question mark. Not really a question -- a demand.

  
_The gutter,_ I scribbled on the back, with a broken Muggle pencil I had in my pocket, and sent the bird off again. And then I did sit down on the edge of the pavement, feet planted firmly in the gutter so I wasn't lying, and breathed the weird London air. It was early summer, and the air was still thick and warm and sickly. Someone passed by me, tossed me a coin. They were gone before I could tell them I didn't want or need it.

  
A while after that, someone with hands in pockets sidled up to me. I knew who it was -- could only have been one of three people, really. We'd all learned to Apparate when we were fifteen, after James had learned from his dad that unless we splinched, the Ministry couldn't track us despite the trace on our wands. At the least, it saved us having to take the nauseating Knight Bus everywhere. We didn't care that it was illegal; we'd already broken laws more times than we could count anyway. And from there, it was a matter of elimination, and I knew James didn't need to, and Peter wouldn't dare.

  
"Hullo, Moony," I said without looking up, because by now I was lying flat on my back in the gutter, some rubbish and foul-smelling liquid under me. I was looking up, and could see exactly four stars, which I emphatically could not name or chart.

  
"Locating charm," he explained, and sat down on the pavement near my head.

  
"Gonna go to Prongs', see if they'll let me sleep on their couch," I said. "Why'd you come?"

  
"Because," Moony said, and looked down at me so that he got between my face and the dim starlight, "You're lying in the gutter. Feeling sorry for yourself and carrying on, when you could've spent the night at the Potters' already. That, and I'm bored."

  
He made it sound like a profound intellectual treatise. He was good at that by then, making things sound smarter than they were, but also more simple. He could just show up, and find me lying on the street somewhere, and tell me with small words and that calm brown voice that I was being an idiot, without ever saying the word.

  
"It takes one to know one," I told him, even though it probably didn't make sense. Maybe because it didn't make sense.

  
"You're a walking clichÃ©, do you know that?"

  
And so I grabbed him by the ear, and pulled him down into the gutter with me. He squawked, like he always squawked when I grabbed him by the anything and pulled him down into the anywhere with me. It was one of those noises that made everything absolutely perfect in the world -- Moony, squawking, meant that I was doing it right.

  
Doing what right? Being Padfoot, probably. My purpose in life: make Moony squawk, and perhaps introduce new and exciting smells to Gryffindor Tower.

  
But he didn't fight it. He laid out on his back, his feet pointing the other way, our heads close so our ears were sort of touching -- and his ears were hot which probably meant that mine were coldÂ­ -- and then we just stayed there, for a while, oblivious to the cars, cabs and occasional busses. I suppose we could have been run down, perhaps we should have been, but the drivers merely honked or shouted from their rolled-down windows. Muggles. Hmph.

  
Remus didn't say anything about the cold, but he's never exactly had much insulation, and he started shivering pretty quickly; a really small tremble, like the surface of tea when a train goes close by. I could smell the sort of sweet-sick smell of garbage rotting, and I could smell the smoke and fumes, burnt and chemical, and I could smell Moony's parents' house, like bergamot and a touch of lapdog. I turned my head to the side so my nose was in his neck, my mouth in his ear, and for a second I just breathed there. It had to have tickled like hell, but he didn't move away, didn't say anything, just breathed in quick.

  
"We're going to get all filthy," I told him, the lowest whisper I knew how, the kind of whisper we were so good at when we were hiding from Filch in the castle after hours. "Lying like here like this. In the muck." He didn't move, didn't even tense, but I glanced up and could see his eyes were closed, lids flickering. He was still shivering a little.

  
"We'll catch our deaths of cold," I went on, even though it was really still warm out, and he was just shivering because he was nothing but skin and bones and corduroy in the night. "They'll find our bodies and think we were just homeless, crazy. They'll write us down as John Doe and his companion, John Doe. Nothing will show in the newspapers. We'll just be..."

  
I pushed forward, so now my lips were really touching his ear, and my nose, right below his ear in his neck, and I couldn't smell the rubbish or the exhaust, anymore, just Moony. "Anonymous. No one."

  
"No," he breathed. "They'll know who we are."

  
I grinned, feeling somewhat mad, and I knew he could feel my teeth. "Why's that? Who are we?"

  
He turned his head and opened his eyes, and his pupils were huge. I wondered if I looked like that -- wild, a little mad, like maybe I was hallucinating. If he weren't Moony, I'd have wondered if he was high. He opened his mouth and drew breath, and I was sure he was going to answer, was going to say something profound and perfect and important; something worth writing down and saving and carving into stone and tattooing on my shoulder, and -- no, he just kind of moved forward, barely a movement at all, so that whatever space there was, wasn't.

  
Kissing upside-down is really, really awkward. Noses get even more in the way than usual, teeth are everywhere, and it takes a lot of concentration. But it was Moony, which meant that I wasn't snogging just anyone, and he wasn't kissing just anyone, because it was me. He reached up and grabbed my hair to hold me still, and I held onto his wrist because it was all I could reach. It was hot enough to stop him shivering. His wrists were so bony in my hands, and his teeth were sharp when he bit my lip, maybe on accident, maybe not.

  
And then he was gone. Or, not gone. Moony was never gone; Moony was omnipresent, Moony was everywhere, Moony was the world. No, he was just pulling back enough to look at me, unfocused, drugged -- completely unbothered by the whole situation. I was sure he'd come to his senses eventually, and tell me I was crazy.

  
I was, by the way. Because that's when I started laughing. It started as a little chuckle, but I couldn't stop. It was like being tumbled in the ocean, like I was not myself; like I was nothing but laughter, laughing so hard at the _look at us, look at us, we are -- _, and I was apart from myself but not from Remus. I was laughing and he was still hanging on to my hair, making sure I didn't fly apart. I thought I would explode; he was hanging on to a bomb.

  
I laughed until breathing didn't matter, until the gutter and the stars I couldn't even see didn't matter. I laughed until my face was wet and hot, and the wet felt cold on my hot cheeks, and he didn't let go -- not even when I couldn't stop, when I _wanted_ to stop but just couldn't, couldn't breathe, couldn't remember why we were here, and...Moony.

  
He should have told me I was crazy. He should have felt sorry for the loss of my brilliant mind to madness (inherited); should have been jealous that I could unhinge so completely into freedom. And when I ran out of breath, ran out of the strength to laugh anymore, he still held on to me by my hair, upside-down and awkward like that.

  
Then he bit my nose, because apparently he is just as crazy as I am.

  
"Mrs. Potter loves you to bits, she won't turn you away," he told me as solemnly as was possible for a madman to speak to another madman. "I'll side-along, then I have to go home. And we'll..."

  
He trailed off, and I made up for it by biting his lip. The noise he made was perfect, so I did it again. I wanted to -- again, still -- fold him up and keep him in my pocket. Just in case: for when sanity was too scary; for when I might need to see his pupils all dilated and strange; for when I needed someone to bite my nose.

  
"Yeah," I said, and he let go. We helped each other up, stumbling a bit and leaning on each other heavily, though there was no real reason to. He brushed some of the rubbish off my back, and there was a bit stuck to his bum, and he turned red in the yellowy darkness when I got that for him. He looked so weird, mussed and out of his school robes, like some odd Muggle kid I'd pass and never look twice at.

  
And then... I went.

  
That summer with Prongs was the most fun I'd had, and we went back to school tanned and freckled and completely riled. And me and Moony... kept on keeping on, a bit. Until I -- .

  
I'm stopping there, because after that it was different, and none of this meant a damn thing -- it'd be something different, not so epic, more real and awful.

  
More sane.

  
I'm stopping there. I have to stop there.


End file.
